Time to Eat the Dogshttp://timetoeatthedogs.com
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The Search for Planet Xhttp://timetoeatthedogs.com/2015/01/26/the-search-for-planet-x/
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On 14 July 2015, the New Horizons spacecraft will make its closest approach to Pluto, passing within 6000 miles of the dwarf planet. As the piano-sized machine begins to stream high-resolution images of Pluto back to earth (which even the Hubble telescope perceives as a murky blob) I thought it would be a good to take a minute and consider the story of Pluto’s discovery in the early decades of the twentieth century.

At this time, Pluto was known as Planet X. Like most stories of discovery, the story of Planet X seems straight-forward at first, then gets more tangled the deeper one digs. It is worth disentangling. The story of Pluto reveals a bigger story about scientific discoveries and the difficulties of attributing credit.

Here’s the straight forward part. On 18 February 1930, Clyde Tombaugh sat in the Lowell Observatory and compared photographic plates taken of the same patch of sky on different days. He was looking for a misalignment of objects from plate to plate — something that would indicate the motion of a comet, asteroid, or planet against the backdrop of stationary stars. The density of stars on the plates made this a nightmarish task — a celestial Where’s Waldo with millions of objects to consider. Yet with the assistance of a blink comparator — a machine that strobes two images back and forth repeatedly — Tombaugh perceived a tiny object moving across the star field. He had discovered a distant planet circling the sun, one forty times more distant than the earth.

This was Planet X. Since the discovery of Neptune in 1846, astronomers had searched excitedly for planets in more distant orbits. Much of this excitement grew out of the way Neptune had been discovered. In the year before it was sighted by Johann Gottfried Galle, Neptune had been predicted by Urbain Le Verrier based upon irregularities in the orbit of Uranus. Put simply, Uranus did not seem to be behaving in accordance with Newton’s laws of motion. At one point in its orbit, Uranus moving faster than predicted. At another point, it moved more slowly. The strange behavior could be explained, Le Verrier argued, by the existence of an planet beyond Uranus that exerted a gravitational pull upon the seventh planet. Le Verrier’s prediction proved correct.

As Uranus circles the sun on the interior orbit, the gravitational force of Neptune accelerates it at point a, then decelerates it at point b. These perturbations led Le Verrier to predict the existence of Neptune before it was observed in 1846.

This was the kind of discovery that brought astronomers to the edge of rapture. Finding Neptune did not arrive by luck or serendipity. It did not appear from some brute process of sorting and observation. It was predicted by the powers of human calculation. It became visible through Le Verrier’s feat of mathematical prediction. He had summoned it, and it had appeared. French physicist Francois Arago marveled at this. “He discovered a planet through the point of his pen.”

Inspired, astronomers began looking for irregularities in Neptune’s orbit as well. Meanwhile, others looked to the orbital radii of comets, which they believed might also point to the influence of a distant unknown planet. By the late 1800s, the astronomical community had become a roadside revival for the prediction of trans-Neptunian planets. As Morton Grosser points out in his 1964 Isis article “The Search for a Planet Beyond Neptune,” the quest for the trans-Neptunian planet “was a kind of celestial grail, and repeated failures to find it seemed to attract new searchers rather than to discourage those already seeking.” (It’s interesting to note that, at exactly the same time, polar explorers were approaching the North Pole with the same giddy attitude and language; see for example Elsa Barker’s 1908 poem “The Frozen Grail.”)

Percival Lowell

In 1915, Percival Lowell tried to weigh the merits of these multiple predictions, all of which were based upon different sets of observational evidence. The exercise was a daunting one, yet in working it out, Lowell seems to have crossed a threshold in his own thinking about his craft, one that makes him sound more like a philosopher of science than an astronomer hunting for planets.

The theory of a planet cannot in the nature of things be exact; and this for three reasons:

1) The observations on which it is founded are necessarily more or less in error;

2) The theory itself may be more or less imperfect

3) An unknown body may be acting of which perforce no account has been given

Nevertheless, Lowell came down to earth long enough to make a prediction of his own. Planet X did exist. It could be located in a an orbit of forty-three astronomical units (where 1 au = distance between the sun and the earth). In mass, it would be twice as big as the earth. Lowell died in 1916 but the quest to find Planet X continued. When Tombaugh found the flickering spot of light in his blink comparator in 1930, it seemed to be vindication for Lowell’s prediction. When the name “Pluto” was offered by 11-year old Venetia Burney from Oxford England, it found approval at the Lowell Observatory. The name — representing the Roman god of the underworld — seemed suitable for a planet that was so cold, dark, and distant. Moreover, the symbol of the planet would be cast as ♇, which also functioned as a monogram for Percival Lowell.

Yet from the very beginning, Lowell’s status as discoverer was controversial. Astronomers noted that while Lowell’s prediction was in the neighborhood of Pluto’s position, it wasn’t an exact fit. Nor was it clear that Pluto was big enough to exert a gravitational effect upon Neptune big enough to explain the irregularities of Neptune’s orbit. In 1951, a paper by V. Kourganoff vindicated Lowell’s prediction, and there matters stood until 1978 when astronomer Robert Sutton Harrington of the US Naval Observatory determined that the mass of Pluto, at 1/500th the mass of the Earth, was too small to influence the orbital path of Neptune. Lovell’s prediction — through no fault of his own — fell short according to errors in observation, the first point in his 1915 article.

Accordingly, the discovery of Pluto did not follow in Neptune’s footsteps, because it was discovered as a matter of luck rather than of prediction. It seems that Tombaugh was looking at the right place, at the right time, but for the wrong reasons. So should Lowell be stricken from the record of Pluto’s discovery. Should we rename this icy dwarf planet according to other names proposed in 1930: Zeus, Minerva, or Cronus?

Then again, would Tombaugh even have been looking for Planet X if Lowell had not made such a persuasive case for finding it there? Certainly there was a degree of luck in finding Pluto. Yet, it was a discovery that also required powerful equipment, careful practice, and a dogged conviction that Lowell was right. In this, Pluto takes its place next to a number of scientific and geographical discoveries — from Columbus’s “discovery” of America” to Kepler’s search for a divine planetary arrangement. Unlike Neptune’s “discovery at the point of a pen,” perhaps Planet X’s epitaph should read “Look long enough and you will find it.”

So many books have been written by and about astronauts that it doesn’t seem like there is much left to cover. Yet Matthew H. Hersch breaks new ground in Inventing the American Astronaut (Palgrave Macmillian, 2012) by examining the evolution of the astronaut as a professional class. Space history, as Asif Saddiqi points out in “American Space History: Legacies, Questions, and Opportunities for Further Research,” too easily falls into a number of familiar plot lines — the hero quest, the Cold War race, the triumph of American technology, or the restless spirit of human exploration — all of which drive professional historians completely crazy. Why? Because these plot lines often dictate the direction of the narrative rather than the details of the subject itself.

Hersch doesn’t fall into this trap. The creation of the astronaut corp, he makes clear, could have unfolded differently. Early NASA administrators thought that test pilots — comfortable with technology, accepting of risk, and rigorous in their shakedowns of new planes — would make the best candidates for spaceflight. Once these test pilots entered the astronaut corps, flying the missions of the Mercury Program, they gained authority as popular heroes, influenced the design of spacecraft, and entered the NASA ranks as senior pilots and administrators. Thus established, the test-pilot astronaut became the benchmark by which future candidates were measured. Space scientists, by contrast, were generally ranked lower than test pilots and waited longer for flight assignments. While NASA’s 1958 charter put a priority on “the expansion of human knowledge of the Earth and of phenomena in the atmosphere and space” science was of secondary importance on Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo missions. Moreover, the narrow demographics of military test pilots — almost all of whom were white and male — became the demographic of the NASA astronaut as well. Only in the 1970s and 1980s would this begin to change as women, minorities, and non-test pilot astronauts entered the ranks with the Space Shuttle.

Behind the scenes, astronauts endured hardships that extended beyond the risks of spaceflight. The selection process was highly competitive, but also mysterious. It was unclear which skills — physical, intellectual, interpersonal, or psychological — were most important for obtaining a mission assignment. Once astronauts flew in space, their public and professional cache increased dramatically — as well as their opportunities for future missions. Rookie astronauts, by contrast, lived more precariously — never knowing for certain whether or not they would receive a flight assignment. So while the public viewed astronauts as cool-headed professionals, the reality was less inspiring. The Astronaut Office,wrote NASA engineer Homer Hickam, was producing “bureaucratic combatants with warped personalities” (162).

If this sounds like more like Dilbert than Deep Space 9 it is because Hersch has a larger point, one that he makes convincingly: the astronaut represented a late 20th century professional class, one that demonstrated many similarities to earlier 20th century professionals, particularly middle-class engineers. Even at 25,000 mph, these rocket men could not escape the gravitational pull of the workplace, a force that shaped the arc of their careers from Johnson Space Center to the Sea of Tranquility.

The fate of the Australasian Antarctica Expedition — still stranded in pack ice off the coast of Antarctica — got me thinking about the value of reenacting expeditions. I wrote an opinion piece on the subject for National Geographic. Getting trapped in pack ice isn’t always a bad idea. In 1895, Fridjof Nansen intentionally sailed his ship Fram into the polar pack ice in hopes of reaching the North Pole. While he fell short, he achieved a new “Farthest North.” I will be speaking about this subject on an episode of Mysteries at the Museum, airing on 2 January at 9pm (EST).

Last year, I helped the curators at the Barnum Museum in Bridgeport CT identify an old sleeping bag in their collection — one that is connected to the rescue of Greely and six of his men in 1884. I’ll be giving a public talk about the subject “The Greely Expedition: A Tale of Triumph and Tragedy in the Arctic.” at the Barnum on 23 February at 2pm.

Only after Adolphus Greely had directed his men to build their long bunk house at Fort Conger, when the long night of winter had descended on Lady Franklin Bay, did he direct the party to begin preparations for using the Peirce No. 1. Greely was a man who, much like Israel, was comfortable with data collection and precision instruments. He had overseen the creation of a vast telegraph network in the U.S. Army Signal Corps, becoming the Army’s top meteorologist. Perhaps this was a reason for the close bond that grew up between the two men. Greely identified a site on the north side of the house, a space sheltered under a canvas lean-to, where the pendulum could be placed. A party began digging the holes and pouring the Portland cement piers that would anchor the instrument. Digging frozen ground in the dark at -30°F wasn’t pleasant work and even Greely, not inclined to complain about conditions, described the process as “tedious and trying.” The men built an ice house around the pendulum frame to protect it from the elements and to stabilize its temperature. They placed a glass window with the wall in order for Israel to record measurements without entering the ice house. Only then did they remove the pendulum from its tin shroud and long wooden case. There, they hung it to swing in its dark, frigid chamber.[1]

Adolphus Greely

The delay in setting up the pendulum was deliberate. Peirce had recognized that the Arctic winter offered special advantages for pendulum use. The frozen ground firmed up the support of the concrete piers, reducing the flexure of the frame that might change the duration of the pendulum’s swing. In winter, the frigid Arctic air was very dry, reducing humidity that would deposit moisture on the pendulum, skewing its weight. Finally, the depth of winter would also bring greater consistency of temperature, important to limit any expansion or contraction of the metal itself.[2]

Yet for Israel, the difficult work was only beginning. The relative simplicity of the Peirce No. 1 belied the complexity of Peirce’s instructions. The Superintendent had given Israel a daunting list of requirements for the pendulum’s proper use. Israel needed to swing the pendulum within a very specific range of motion: not larger than 25/1000ths and not smaller than 5/1000ths of the arc radius. The pendulum had to be swung for ninety minutes, reversed, and swung again for thirty. This series needed to be repeated multiple times, so that the total time of pendulum measurements reached six hours a day.[3]

In addition to marking each swing over time, Israel had to record temperatures as well. Since the thermometer couldn’t touch the pendulum, Peirce directed Israel to set up thermometers near the top and the bottom of the instrument, making sure that each did not vary perceptibly from one another or over the time of the swing. Finally, Israel had to measure the flexure of the frame itself, which Peirce instructed, could not vary more than 1/200th of a millimeter. Although the glass window allowed Israel to measure each swing from the comfortable distance of the house, he still had to swing the pendulum, measure temperature, and look for microscopic flexures of the frame. In the end, Greely records that “for sixteen days in January 1882 he diligently swung Peirce Pendulum No. 1 in a specially constructed ice shelter.” After the sixteen-day series was complete, the pendulum was placed within its slender wood box and sealed once again in tin, to wait for its transport home with the party in the summer of 1882. The entire sequence of the pendulum experiment, from Peirce’s training to Israel’s execution had been meticulously planned and executed. For Greely and his party it represented a triumph of science over sensationalism, one that would contrast sharply and tragically with the catastrophe that followed.[4]

Cape Sabine, Ellesmere Island, 1884

The expedition that came to relieve the Greely Party at Fort Conger in 1882 was turned back by ice. Greely and his men, despondent at the lack of relief, overwintered for a second year and waited for the arrival of a second relief expedition in 1883. Yet this expedition, too, failed to reach Fort Conger, crushed by pack ice in the southern reaches of Smith Sound. As it became clear that the second expedition was not going to arrive in 1883, Greely made preparations to evacuate Fort Conger and travel south in small boats.[5]

The Greely Party Leaves Fort Conger, 1883. Credit: NOAA

The forced retreat created a dilemma for Greely and his men. It was crucial to return the pendulum to Washington so that it could be inspected and swung again by Peirce, confirming the measurements taken at Fort Conger. Yet the pendulum in its tin case and wooden crate added over forty kilograms of dead weight to an increasingly desperate escape effort.

Greely hoped to find stores near Cape Sabine left by the relief expeditions. Yet arriving at the southern reaches of Smith Sound, the party found few provisions. With little hope of finding more food, the party would now have to carry the pendulum as they dragged their boats over the pack ice. Greely took the issue to his men:

I informed the men that I was unwilling, much as I wanted to save that instrument, to lessen their chances of life by hauling it longer, unless all concurred, and that it would be dropped whenever they wished. Not only was there no objection to keeping it, but several of the party were outspoken in considering it unmanly to abandon it. Such a spirit is certainly most credible.’[6]

The men continued to carry the pendulum, stripping off the tin shroud to reduce weight. Eventually, they cached the Peirce No. 1 on Stalknecht Island, just off the shore of Cape Sabine. While it had functioned as a precision instrument in Washington and Fort Conger, the Peirce No. 1 now became a rescue beacon for relief ships entering Smith Sound, its long box anchored as a tower to the rock cairn to make it more visible, a note tucked within the rocks giving the party’s location on Cape Sabine.

During the winter and spring of 1884, the members of the Greely party slowly succumbed to starvation. On 27 May 1884, Israel began speaking quietly of home, his mother’s cooking. He became delirious and died. Greely, who shared a sleeping bag with Israel during their final desperate months, wrote that he “learned to love him like a brother.” When Greely conducted Israel’s burial, he edited the Christian service to make it consistent with the astronomer’s Jewish faith. Twenty four days after Israel died, a rescue party under the command of Winfield Schley arrived at Cape Sabine where they found Greely and six men close to death, the last survivors of the twenty-five men crew. Schley had expected to find Greely further north at Fort Conger, but his men saw the cairn on Stalknecht Island and went to investigate. There, they found the tall pendulum in its box, still projecting upwards from the rocks.

Washington D C., August, 1884

Thousands of well-wishers turned out in Portsmouth New Hampshire to welcome Greely and his men home. The day was filled with speeches and a parade of over two thousand. Speaking of the value of the expedition, Senator Eugene Hale of Maine told the crowds, “Nothing dims its record. There was no insubordination, no blundering, no losing of the head.” Hale’s remarks were premature. As he spoke, evidence was emerging that some members of the party had resorted to cannibalism in their final months at Cape Sabine. The press also discovered that the Greely party was riven by conflicts, especially during the long retreat from Fort Conger when Greely’s officers had almost relieved Greely of his command. As these discoveries swirled in the pages of the popular press, Greely defended himself, the bravery of the party, and the expedition’s commitment to science.[7]

Key to this defense was the party’s unanimous decision to carry the Peirce No. 1 out of the Arctic despite its weight. Greely chronicled this event in his final report, and it also appeared in the Coast Survey report as well as popular press accounts. As a result, the pendulum gained symbolic importance. It was at this moment, ironically, that Peirce began to question the instrument’s scientific value. He had measured the pendulum at the Coast Survey Building in late 1884 and observed that its length and mass had changed significantly since 1881. As a benchmark of Israel’s Arctic measurements, then, the pendulum seemed useless. Greely was furious, defending himself and Israel in a letter that he attached to Peirce’s report. Yet the long brass bar yielded results of a different kind. While it may have failed to measure the contours of the earth, in the eyes of many nineteenth-century Americans, it offered something more valuable in return: a measure of scientific spirit and manly character, one that protected Greely and the reputation of the expedition party in the decades to come.[8]

[This essay was published by the journal Endeavour in December 2012: 36(4):187-90]

[1] Greely quoted from Three Years of Arctic Service: An Account of the Lady Franklin Bay Expedition, 1881-1884 (New York, 1894) 1:119.

Peirce Pendulum at the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC. It is believed to be identical to the Peirce pendulum brought by Adolphus Greely into the Arctic. Photo courtesy of Dr. Geoffrey Clark.

Washington D.C., July 1881

Sargent Edward Israel arrived in Washington and made his way up Capitol Hill to the Coast Survey Building. He had an appointment with C.S. Peirce, Assistant at the Coast Survey, who would instruct Israel in the use of scientific instruments needed for the Greely Expedition, scheduled to depart for the Arctic in a few weeks. At twenty-two, Israel was the youngest member of the expedition. He had just finished his degree in astronomy at the University of Michigan where he had impressed faculty with his command of theoretical astronomy. He was comfortable with scientific equipment and well-prepared to do complicated calculations and reductions. Yet the biggest challenge that would face him on this expedition was in the gathering of data. His meeting with Peirce was not merely a lesson in how to use instruments, but how to use them in extreme conditions.[1]

Lt. Edward Israel, from Greely Expedition photo, 1881.

When the Greely Expedition built its station on Ellesmere Island at 81°N latitude, it would be the northernmost outpost in the world, and one of the most difficult places on earth to do science. One of twelve stations to be established during the International Polar Year (IPY) of 1881-1882, the American outpost would record – along with all of the other stations – a variety of terrestrial phenomena including tides, weather, temperature, wind speed, and barometric pressure. The IPY was the brainchild of Austrian explorer, Karl Weyprecht, an attempt to redirect the energies of polar explorers away from flag planting and records of “Farthest North” towards something more substantial: a sustained and systematic program of Arctic research.[2]

When Israel arrived at the Coast Survey Building, he was met by Peirce. The two men descended into the basement and entered Room 6. There, anchored by concrete piers, suspended from a large trapezoidal frame hung a long brass bar, the Peirce Pendulum No. 1. Few people would have identified the object as a pendulum. It did not have a round weight or a thin arm. It was not an object one would find oscillating in the case of a grandfather clock. The Peirce No. 1 was unremarkable except for small projections, “knife edges,” that jutted out of the sides of bar near its top and bottom and allowed the pendulum to hang freely in its wooden frame.[3]

Peirce set the pendulum in motion, swinging it a few centimeters off center. The heavy bar, rocking back and forth on the slender pivot of its knife edges, swept out small, regular arcs. Israel did not record his impressions that day. He would not survive the expedition to write about it later. Perhaps his college experience with the instruments of astronomy, the telescopes that offered him spectacular views of planets and nebulae, made him jaded to the operations of the Peirce No. 1. Yet even someone less experienced with scientific instruments than Israel, some imaginary passer-by who found himself in Room 6 that day, would have struggled to find either drama or meaning in the Peirce No. 1’s slow monotonous motions. It appeared almost too simple to be useful.

Yet it was the monotony of this pendulum that gave it its power. Allowed to swing freely, a pendulum will repeat its journey back and forth in the same period of time, even as the height of its swing diminishes. It did not escape the attention of Galileo or other Renaissance scholars that the regularity of this motion offered a valuable way of measuring time itself. By the 1650s, the Dutch mathematician Christiaan Huygens understood the movement of a pendulum well enough to describe it mathematically:

T = π√(l/g)

where the time (T) of the pendulum’s swing varies directly with its length (l) and indirectly with the force of gravity (g). Assuming that gravity remains constant, the most important variable determining the pendulum’s swing is the length of its arm. By lengthening or shortening this arm, the pendulum can be made to sweep out an arc of desired duration. After Huygens patented his first pendulum clock in 1657, clockmakers developed a “seconds pendulum” that offered a spectacular improvement in accuracy from earlier clocks, reducing error from fifteen minutes to fifteen seconds a day.[4]

Christiaan Huygens’s design for a pendulum clock, 1673.

By the 1700s, the pendulum had also found more esoteric uses. Since clockmakers had succeeded in showing that a swinging bob could be used as a measure of time, it stood to reason that that swinging bob, marked by increments of time, could be used as a measure of gravity. Gravity appeared to be remarkably stable over time, but was it also stable over distance? On a perfectly spherical earth, this should be the case since the distance between the surface and the earth’s center of mass would never vary. A distortion of the planetary sphere, however, would produce variations in gravity from place to place, ones that might be detectible by the swinging of a pendulum.[5] For this reason, in the 1730s, the French geodetic expeditions of Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis and Charles Marie de La Condamine carried gravity pendulums with them to the polar and equatorial regions respectively, attempting to resolve a dispute between French geographer Jean-Dominique Cassini, who believed the earth was slightly egg-shaped, and Isaac Newton who was convinced it was squashed like a jelly-donut. The expeditions proved Newton right, but did not give enough data to describe to the shape of the geoid with precision.[6]

This was the objective of Israel and the Peirce No. 1: to determine the precise shape of the earth from the swinging of the pendulum. In so doing, it fit comfortably within the pendulum’s expanding role as an instrument of research, marking a procession of important instruments from Condamine’s pendulum in the 1700s to Foucault’s pendulum in the 1800s. Gradually the pendulum had evolved from a symbol of timekeeping to a symbol of science. As such, it conformed nicely to the broader objectives of the IPY: to reinvent Arctic exploration as something serious, scientific, and collaborative.

As the simple brass bar swung on its knife edges in Room 6, Peirce recorded the duration of its swings. The meeting had provided Israel with a tutorial in operating the pendulum, but it had offered Peirce something equally important: a series of measurements that he could compare with those made by Israel in the Arctic. As they concluded their meeting, Israel departed. In Room 6, the Peirce No. 1 was carefully packed in a long wooden case and sealed with tin. In the days that followed, it was shipped north with other expedition equipment to St. John’s Harbor, Newfoundland where it was stowed below deck on Greely’s expedition ship, Proteus. On 7 July, the ship set sail with the expedition party for Lady Franklin Bay, an inlet on the northeastern shore of Ellesmere Island, the northernmost island in the Arctic Archipelago.[7]

[This essay was published by the journal Endeavour in December 2012: 36(4):187-90]

[1] I want to thank Dr. Geoffrey Clark for his support in this project. I wrote about Greely’s pendulum briefly in The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), but he convinced me that this instrument was part of a larger story. He has also generously allowed me to use his photos of the Peirce pendulum for this essay.

[2] William Barr, The Expeditions of the First International Polar Year, 1882-83 (Calgary: Arctic Institute of North America, University of Calgary, 1985). The goals of the IPY did not prevent the Greely Expedition from also pursuing a record of “Farthest North.” Weyprecht’s ideals co-existed with nationalistic and adventurist interests in the Polar Regions.

[3] C.S. Peirce, “Pendulum Observations” in Report on the Proceedings of the United States Expedition to Lady Franklin Bay, Grinnell Land (Washington, DC.: Government Printing Office, 1888), 2: 701-714.

[4] The changing amplitude of a pendulum swing does have a small effect on its period, something that Huygens pointed out in his work Horologium Oscillatorium sive de motu pendulorum (1673); Matthew Bennett et al., “Huygens’ Clocks,” Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, (2002) A 458, 563–579; Victor Fritz Lenzen and Robert P. Multhauf, “Development of Gravity Pendulums in the 19th Century,” Contributions from the Museum of History and Technology, Papers 34-44, On Science and Technology (Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1966), 305-6, 324-330.

]]>http://timetoeatthedogs.com/2013/03/17/greelys-pendulum-part-1-of-2/feed/2Michaelimage 2, ENDE_444Pierce Pendulum at the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC. It is believed to be identical to the Pierce pendulum brought by Adolphus Greely into the Arctic. Photo courtesy of Dr. Geoffrey Clark.Lt. Edward Israel, from Greely Expedition photo, 1881.Christiaan Huygens design for a pendulum clock, 1673.Beyond the Extremehttp://timetoeatthedogs.com/2013/01/27/beyond-the-extreme/
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“Skydive Sunset Blue” (2005) Photo Credit: Rick Neves

Would you climb an 8000-meter mountain? Descend in a submersible seven miles under the sea? Pilot a shuttle back to earth at 17,000mph? Most of us choose other paths. The astronaut who arcs around the earth every ninety minutes seems to trace out a life faster and wilder than ours down below, where we make the slow orbit from home to work and home again. It’s understandable, then, why we place explorers and adventurers in a category by themselves, honor them with statues, magazine covers, and tickertape parades. Those who take such risks, these travelers of the extreme, seem to shine with a different light. They do otherworldly things and appear, at times, born of other worlds themselves, brought up within the same towns perhaps, attending the same schools, but made alien through the crucible of perilous experience. Or, perhaps, they were alien to begin with, living among us, sharing our food and oxygen, but pushed by different winds, compelled like Icarus to fly towards the sun. We laugh at Tom Wolfe when he tells us that astronauts are made of the right stuff, but we believe him. Whether by nature or by experience, explorers seem set apart. They are different.

Shuttle Discovery Cockpit, STS 33, November 1989

If this is so, what makes them different? Is it their endurance of risk? Among modern day explorers and adventurers, astronauts experience the most risk. As they enter their spacecraft, they know that they have a one to two percent chance of not coming back. This is a much higher risk than piloting a commercial plane, hand gliding, or bungee jumping. Still, it is not beyond other earthly perils. Most astronauts only make one or two flights into space. Seen as a cumulative risk over the course of their careers, astronauts endure about the same odds of death as loggers and fishermen. Yet the dangers of exploding space craft, sinking ships, and falling trees are dwarfed by the perils of getting old, perhaps the riskiest human activity of all. Being 80 years old for six months carries with it twice the risk of death of suiting up for a flight on the space shuttle. If we value risk as a measure of mettle, then, we should be looking to verandas and nursing homes rather than the void of space.

This comparison falls short because it ignores the question of motive. Risk attends many things. We need to work. We cannot help getting old. But explorers and adventurers choose risk over safer pursuits, accept danger in their quest for something else. If risk, by itself, signifies little, risk freely accepted represents a conscious commitment. Yet commitment to what? Historically, explorers have offered many motives. The Arctic explorers of the International Polar Year (1882-1883) spoke of their desire to advance science. Henry Morton Stanley, David Livingstone, and Richard Burton all pursued geographical discovery, suffering malarial fevers in their quest to find the source of the Nile. The Mercury Seven, who strapped themselves to the top of Atlas rockets, spoke of their commitment to patriotism, competing with the Soviet cosmonauts for the dominance of space.

Yet these are not the only motives that draw people to the extreme. For many, the goal of the journey is risk itself. Danger is not the cost of admission, but the feature attraction. Free-solo climbing, BASE jumping, and wingsuit flying are activities that do little to advance science, geography, or national pride. Yet for disciples of these sports, these activities offer the promise of exploring inner worlds: survey expeditions to map the contours of fear, endurance, and self-control. Risk is the object of these missions, the means of expanding consciousness, the catalyst of self-knowledge. If explorers and adventurers are unique, then, it is difficult to pinpoint exactly what makes them unique. They are a diverse group, drawn to extreme experience for different reasons.

Woman Before the Rising Sun, Caspar David Friedrich, 1820.

It has always been this way. The oldest stories in human history — Exodus, Gilgamesh, and The Odyssey — are travel epics, stories of knowledge gained through hardship. Yet the nature of this knowledge has always been mixed, the lessons of the voyage open to multiple interpretations. If the extreme is an oracle that offers wisdom, it is one that speaks in riddles. Does the journey give us knowledge about the world, as the work of Pliny, John Mandeville, and Marco Polo suggest? Or does it function, as Plato, Siddhārtha Gautama, and St Francis seemed to think, as a way of gaining knowledge about oneself? In practice, these two motives for travel – worldly knowledge and self-knowledge – were never mutually exclusive. Three thousand years of travel literature have combined elements of both.

Yet by the 1800s, the idea of travel started to fray and come apart. Those who identified themselves as travelers could be grouped into a large category that encompassed every itinerant from Joseph Banks, science officer of the Endeavour, to British lads on vacation. As the concept of traveler lost definition in the eighteenth century, “explorer” entered the vernacular to delineate it, to distinguish the extreme traveler and scientific investigator from more quotidian voyagers, the doe-eyed ingénues of the Grand Tour. At the same time, artists of the Romantic Period, who worshipped nature as an untamable force, identified the essence of extreme travel, the force which pulled travelers towards waterfalls, cliffs, and active volcanoes. They called it “the Sublime.”

Our ideas about the extreme were forged in this historical moment. Since the 19th century, we have expected our explorers to be researchers, to bring back specimens and samples. Yet in truth, we pay little attention to their scientific work. (For example, can you name one scientific discovery made by astronauts on the moon?). Instead, we marvel at the experience of their journeys, their perilous escapes. We read books about Shackleton, the explosion on Apollo 13, and Armstrong’s first steps on the moon. We remain conflicted about the meaning of the extreme. We expect our astronauts to be astrophysicists, but we want to them to speak to us like Major Tom. Through their eyes, we see other worlds too.

Ernest Shackleton

Our attempts to define the limits of the extreme will always be fraught; not merely because the diversity of motives which draw people towards it, but because of our own mixed feelings about what it means. We read books about polar explorers, attend IMAX films about disasters on Mt. Everest. We watch YouTube videos about skydivers, cave divers, and BASE jumpers. We do this, not because we seek to place these people in a special category, but because we feel drawn to this category ourselves. We imagine ourselves on the razor’s edge, on the lip of the abyss, at the boundary of life and death, and marvel at it. Sitting in beach chairs near the life guard tower, we recognize the absurdity of our condition, reading Into Thin Air as we apply SPF 50 sunscreen, projecting ourselves on the slopes of Everest as we eat gluten-free snacks. We do so in spite of the incongruity between the lives we live and the lives we imagine. We suffer these ironies because the explorer still speaks to us. We read, we watch, and in doing this, we feel more alive.

“Beyond the Extreme” was originally published in the online arts journal Drunken Boat, volume 16, available here.

For the past three weeks, I’ve been in Uganda doing research on my next book, Lost White Tribe: Explorers, Scientists, and a Theory of Race that Changed Africa (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). The book begins in 1876 in East Africa, where the journalist and explorer Henry Morton Stanley encountered four Africans whose light complexion and European features “aroused [his] curiosity to the highest pitch.” They came from the slopes of Gambaragara, a snow-capped mountain west of Lake Victoria. That such a towering range existed in the heart of equatorial Africa was astonishing enough. “But what gives it peculiar interest,” Stanley wrote, “is, that on its cold and lonely top dwell a people of an entirely distinct race, being white, like Europeans.”

Stanley’s story had the ring of the fantastic about it, but was taken seriously by scientists, explorers, and the general public — and came to be supported by evidence ranging from the origin stories of the Hebrew Bible, the discovery of ancient ruins in Egypt and Zimbabwe, the kingship legends of African cultures, and the physical differences observed — by Stanley and many others — among African tribes. The existence of white tribes of Africa was a theory, defenders claimed, supported by many pillars. Lost White Tribe traces the rise and fall of this theory, the Hamitic Hypothesis, and the scientific expeditions that gave it life.

After completing my research at Makerere University in Kampala, I took a bus west to Kasese, and then hired a motorcycle taxi to Kilembe. This small town was the gateway to the Rwenzoris, the tallest mountain range in Africa. Just east of here Stanley glimpsed the massive blue silhouette of Gambaragara (now called Mt. Stanley) for the first time. I spent eight days on Mt. Stanley with a Bakonzo guide and porters, recording what I could of the mountain, its people, and my own subjective experiences. Here are some brief excerpts:

Kilembe, Western Uganda. Gateway to the Rwenzoris.

10 January 2013 Sine Camp 8576 ft (2596m)

At 9:30 we walk into Kilembe village, past wooden huts and kiosks, men raking coffee beans, selling cell phone time, children driving cows. Rows of single-level dormitories stretch off to the left covered by rusty metal roofs, goats graze the courtyards between. The dorms were originally built as housing units for workers of the British copper mining company that came here years before. Now muzungu money enters the valley only from coffee sales or trekkers like me. The presence of whites is now rare enough to peak interest. Or fear. As we climb the trailhead, we pass a woman bringing her children to work the vertical fields of bananas and cassava ahead. Her daughter, about three years old, is ahead of us on the trail. As the girl sees us approach, separating her from her mother, she begins to cry. When she sees me, her cries grow sharp. I remove my sunglasses thinking it will help. Bad idea. She screams, covers her eyes, leaps off the trail. Scary muzungu.

William Kiminywa finds a path through the mud.

11 January 2013 Kalalama Camp 10,327 ft (3147m)

My guide William Kiminywa is Bakonzo, a member of an ethnic group that inhabits the lowlands of the Ruwenzoris, from Western Uganda to Eastern Congo. All of the porters are Bakonzo too, mostly from Kilembe. He’s heard no talk of “white Africans” living on the mountains, but clearly the mountains are a place of the sacred and the strange. William will not say the names of the mountains that tower above us on both sides of the valley – 13,000ft pinnacles that drop straight down to the heather trees of the valley. He writes out the names in my journal instead. Unwise to say the original Bakonzo names out loud. He is no mere folklorist though. William knows the Rwenzoris like no one else. We hike through knee-deep swamps and bogs, oceans of mud. He always sees a way through though – rocks, branches, tussocks invisible to me – stepping stones through the black ooze. I call him the mud whisperer. He laughs. But its true, his knowledge goes deep, sensory and academic. Where I see a mass of ferns and heather, he sees colobus monkeys, dikas, rock hyrax, turacos. He points them out to me quietly with his walking pole, whispering their Latin names so as not to scare them away. I nod, write, take pictures.

Blue Monkeys, 12,000 ft.

12 January 2013 Bugata Camp 13,327 ft (4062m)

Today we approach the lower arm of Mt. Stanley. We are now closer to the mountain than Stanley was in 1876 when he climbed a small mountain near the Katonga River and “caught a passing glimpse of the king of mountains Gambaragara.” It was at the summit of this great mountain, Stanley’s African troops told him, that the white Gambaragarans lived amid the snow and craters lakes. Still, my head is elsewhere today. Tess completes in the final round of an oratory contest in Bloomfield, a big event in her life and to miss it hurts a bit. More than a bit. I feel the isolation of the mountains as we go higher. William is fantastic, and his crew of porters are polite, knowledgeable, professional, but no companions. I am a client, not a friend. The porters bring food, supplies, then retreat to their own tents. Tea and biscuits at 4pm, even in rainstoms, on windy cliffs. When I visit their quarters to talk, they stand, go silent. I’m unshaven, unshowered, caked with mud, but I’m still the Earl of Grantham and I’ve come to servants’ quarters unannounced. My liberal politics, my critiques of colonialism, Victorian explorers, mean nothing here. I enter a fixed role, one that’s been set in place in Africa for hundreds of years and is kept in place by all kinds of trekkers organizations here, Kilimanjaro, maybe the Himalayas too? (I must ask the Everest people). I’m head muzungu. It’s Upstairs Downstairs, only at altitude. Where’s my pith helmet?

Summit of Mt. Stanley, border between Uganda and Congo, dividing point between the watersheds of the Congo and Nile Rivers.

15 January 2013 Margherita Camp 14,714 ft (4485m)

We leave at 3 am for the summit, headlamps on. I stay very close to William. I never know if the blackness covers a slope or sheer void. After an hour of hiking we’re in snow, then glacier. We take thirty minutes to put on crampons and harnesses, rope up. The march across Elena Glacier is calming after the rocks. Black sky and an ocean of white, just the sound of our feet. We descent a sharp pinnacle of rocks, then we’re on Margherita Glacier. This is not calming. The glacier is steep here, very steep, and the wind howls. I don’t know how many knots but its enough to push flinty pieces of ice up the 50° slope towards the summit and into the skies over Congo. They hit us and keep moving. The air is so thin, it cracks my lips and it’s impossible to catch my breath. I shuffle like an old man. William seems unaffected. Three hours of this and we are finally the rocky crown. It’s so hard to move up this craggy face, I have to crawl at points towards the summit. When we’re there, I stand and sob. I can’t help it. An accumulation of feelings over the six day ascent, and longer perhaps, the three weeks in Kampala and Western Uganda. There are many points of contact between Stanley’s description, those of his African soldiers, and what I see here. The ice and snow, the small lakes in the shadow of the glacier, the great elevation. But there are no lost whites up here – well — none except for me. And maybe there’s something to that. Stanley wasn’t the only one to think he saw white people in weird places. Not a product of lying, I think, but, more likely wishful thinking. A racial Rorschach test. It may have given Stanley – already a lonely man — some comfort to imagine Africans who shared his color, his features, perhaps his kinship, so far from home.

Jason Anthony knows about the cuisine in Antarctica. He spent eight seasons on the southern continent in the U.S Antarctica Program. In Hoosh: Roast Penguin, Scurvy Day, and Other Stories of Antarctic Cuisine, he uses this knowledge as a way of examining the culture and history of food in Antarctic exploration. It is a new approach to a topic that often considers heroism, flag planting, and sledging distances but not the stuff that most occupied the thoughts of polar explorers: food. Look for Hoosh in November when it comes out with University of Nebraska Press.

Excerpt from Hoosh, Chapter 4, “Meat and Melted Snow,” with the permission of Jason Anthony and University of Nebraska Press:

Early travel into interior Antarctica required a level of planning and austerity unsurpassed in exploration until humans ventured into space. When the men of the heroic age left their coastal huts to explore the hinterlands, they left behind the last vestige of ordinary life. No stockpiled crates of food, no fresh meat squawking outside the door; the continent offered only cold air to breathe and hard snow to melt. Sustenance was limited to what they could carry, and they could not carry much, because, paradoxically, the less food weight they carried the farther they could go. Up to a point. Robert Scott expressed the dilemma elegantly: “The issue is clear enough: one desires to provide a man each day with just sufficient food to keep up his strength, and not an ounce beyond.”

Terra Nova trail cuisine

Success in sledging depended on embracing the austerity with which Antarctica greeted these men. Sledging food had to be complete but also simple, concentrated, dehydrated, compressed, calculated, and packed tightly. Most expeditions brought pemmican, a perfect endurance food used by Native Americans for millennia, and converted it on the trail to “hoosh,” their stew of pemmican and melted snow, usually thickened with crushed biscuit. This was supplemented by a carbohydrate, usually biscuits, and often some modicum of sugar, caffeine, and dairy fat. Units of each were calculated in volume and weight and accumulated only up to the thin line between starvation and distance desired.

Antarctic sledging began with Frederick Cook teaching the craft to Roald Amundsen on the Belgica. On January 30, 1898, expedition leader Adrien de Gerlache, Cook, Amundsen, and two others undertook the first Antarctic sledge journey, climbing a short distance to a peak on Brabant Island and camping for seven days. Difficult weather confined them to a “sybaritic life” in the tent, wrote Gerlache, lounging amid “the aromas of cocoa or the good and cheering smell of pea soup.” Then, at the end of winter, Amundsen, Cook, and Lecointe undertook another short sledge journey toward an iceberg from the ice-trapped Belgica. Cook reports that in their quest for fresh meat Amundsen “was solemnly appointed chairman of the order of the penguin.” They tried eating some lousy Swiss soup mix, but threw it away in order to cook up penguin breast in the same pan. That was fine, but when they made hot chocolate in the pan, remnants of the soup and penguin made it “filth” to Lecointe. He had no idea how common such filth would become in Antarctic cuisine.

Despite these pleasant origins, Antarctic sledging was often a profound exercise in risk management. A balance had to be struck between sledging goals and the reality of starvation, between ambition and death. When dogs or ponies pulled the sledge, the burden was shared, while manhauling – when men stepped into harness – was one of the most strenuous human activities ever conceived. It was a sort of voluntary slave labor in the name of patriotism and knowledge, seeking glory in laying claim to the last great blank spot on the map. Their bleak journeys were often fed more with idealism than hoosh.

Shackleton’s Socks

Transport Management

In the tradition of nineteenth century European expeditions to remote areas of Africa, Asia, and the Arctic, some heroic-age expeditions brought beasts of burden to Antarctica that in hard times became meat for the hoosh. Ponies and dogs hauled and then became fodder. After his desperate experience on the ice, Douglas Mawson reasoned that “in an enterprise where human life is always at stake, it is only fair to put forward the consideration that the dogs represent a reserve of food in cases of extreme emergency.” Few things are as efficient on a life-or-death journey as the ability to eat your transportation.

Mostly this was a British affair. Of eighteen heroic-age expeditions, fifteen brought beasts of burden, but only six (four British, one Australian, one Norwegian) converted them into food. Scott’s Discovery expedition fed dogs to dogs as provisions dwindled. On Shackleton’s Nimrod expedition, Siberian ponies pulled sledges full of supplies for his depots on the Ross Ice Shelf before their worn-out carcasses became supplies in the depots. Shackleton was careful to eat this fresh, heavy meat before the lightweight, concentrated pemmican they could carry farther. Sometimes they chewed raw cubes of it as they walked. “One point which struck us all,” Shackleton wrote later, “was how man’s attitude towards food alters as he goes South. At the beginning, a man might have been something of an epicure, but we found that before he got very far even raw horse-meat tasted very good.” Best of all, he said, was blood from a butchered pony frozen into an icy mass in the snow, which was then boiled to thicken the hoosh. Socks, Shackleton’s last pony, fell into a crevasse just hours before he was due to be shot and cut up for food. Shackleton later posited that “the loss of Socks, which represented so many pounds of meat,” might have cost them the Pole.

In Shackleton’s shadow, Scott returned in the Terra Nova to follow the same path to the Pole, using the same ill-suited ponies as transport. As the first five were shot along the trail, each made four or five meals for the dog teams. Scott reported that his men enjoyed the change too: “Tonight we had a sort of stew fry of pemmican and horseflesh and voted it the best hoosh we had ever had on a sledge journey.”

Sometimes it was extreme necessity that drove the men to eat the burdened beasts. Douglas Mawson and Xavier Mertz resorted to eating their dogs only when all other options had disappeared into a black crevasse. Shackleton’s Endurance tale makes it plain that once the disintegration of Weddell Sea ice forced them into crowded boats, there would be no place for their beloved dogs. Shackleton ordered them shot and eaten. It tasted “just like beef,” he said, “but, of course, very tough.”

The name most associated with eating domesticated animals in Antarctica is Roald Amundsen, whose slaughter of twenty four healthy dogs is infamous. Amundsen’s Butcher’s Shop, like Scott’s Shambles Camp, marked not just the end of these animals’ lives but also the place where carcasses were dressed for consumption. “Great masses of beautiful fresh, red meat, with quantities of the most tempting fat, lay spread over the snow,” wrote Amundsen, a hungry Norwegian epicure for whom the dogs’ corpses recalled “memories of dishes on which the cutlets were elegantly arranged side by side, with paper frills on the bones, and a neat pile of petit pois in the middle.”

The story here is neither of epicurean savagery nor even of human hunger, but of transport management. Amundsen, the most professional and shrewd of polar explorers, created a calculus of weights carried and weights consumed for every day of the roundtrip journey to the Pole. He related this to the pulling power of a dog – how many pounds on the sledge each dog could haul. As food and fuel were consumed, weight on the sledge diminished, and at a certain point that lost weight would equal a dog’s pulling power and the dog became superfluous. Amundsen then related “the average weight of edible flesh of a dog and its food value when eaten by the others. By these calculations,” he wrote, “I was able to lay out a schedule of dates upon which dog after dog would be converted from motive power into food.” In this analysis, some dogs were killed so others lived comfortably on the trail. After twenty four dogs were killed at the Butcher’s Shop and after the Norwegians had been to the Pole, six more were slaughtered, one at a time, so the surviving dogs actually gained weight on the return journey. The open question is how many more dogs might Amundsen have brought home safely had he not stuck to his calculation so firmly.

Polar Transport

Though Amundsen shows real affection for individual dogs throughout the story, he was a man on a mission. The animals were slaves to his cause, and so completely did Amundsen believe in that cause that he could write casually of their destruction: “I must admit that [the cutlets] would have lost nothing by being a little more tender, but one must not expect too much of a dog.” In fact, Amundsen expected everything of them, and he got it.]]>http://timetoeatthedogs.com/2012/10/25/book-preview-hoosh-roast-penguin-scurvy-day-and-other-stories-of-antarctic-cuisine/feed/0MichaelhooshTerra Nova trail cuisineShackleton's Sockspolar_trans_lg[1]Book Review: Passage to Cosmoshttp://timetoeatthedogs.com/2012/08/18/book-review-passage-to-cosmos/
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Alexander von Humboldt had the air of the mystic about him. He was a man who wandered mountains, gathered disciples, and looked for hidden meanings. In the age of specialization, he still thought it reasonable to write a book about The Universe. Yet as mystics go, Humboldt was a strange one. His visions did not appear to him in moments of solitude, while sitting in a temple or perched on a mountaintop. Rather, they came to him in the midst of the typhoon, trying to apprehend the deluge of phenomena that swirled about him. While Siddhartha and St Thomas abandoned their possessions, Humboldt hoarded his. Barometers, dip compasses, pressed flowers, dead birds: they fill the Baron’s world. These objects pack the corners of almost every portrait ever made of him (replaced in later years by shelves overflowing with books). If Humboldt was a mystic, he was one who suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Yet it wasn’t that Humboldt couldn’t let go. It was that little things mattered. In ephemeral objects and bits of data, he saw hidden patterns of the world, the connective tissue of the universe. These deeper motives were often invisible to his readers, especially for the first decades of the nineteenth century. In the early years, North Americans and Europeans tended to look upon Humboldt, fondly, as both expert and walking cabinet-of-curiosities. Only in the late 1840s, with the publication of the magisterial Cosmos, did they gain full measure of Humboldt’s interest in the big picture. Even then, however, Humboldt struggled to explain himself, to tell the story of big ideas through the scrupulous account of small phenomena, a project that required greater literary skills than he possessed.

For this reason, Humboldt would have thrilled to read Passage to Cosmos, not because Laura Walls had written about him, but because she had done what he had always hoped to do: bring a fine-grain reading of the subject elegantly to bear on questions of greater scale. Like her subject, Walls fully commands the details of her story. Passage offers a close reading of Humboldt’s early life, his expedition to South America, his return to Europe, and his efforts to articulate a vision of Cosmos. Yet Passage roosts in the trees of Humboldt’s life only so long before soaring off for different views of the woods: Humboldt’s roots in German philosophy, his experiences in the Post-Enlightenment cultures of France and the United States, and his attempts to walk the ridgeline between the emerging “two cultures” of science and literature. Humboldt’s flights from the particular to the general sometimes give the reader vertigo. This is not true of Passage. Walls shows exceptional skill in bringing us from microcosm to macrocosm and back again, never losing sight of the narrative arc of her story.

There is, of course, no perfect view of the woods, the Universe, or Prussian explorers. As Humboldt understood, the human subject was not, nor could be, mere witness to Nature. It was its co-creator, the imaginative agent that put disparate phenomena together into a whole. This is true of biographies too. Passage reflects Walls’ deep understanding of American literary and scientific circles in the 19th century, the educated “Culture of Truth” that embraced Humboldt’s work and adapted its ideas for use in natural history, philosophy, and literature.

Yet there were other channels of the Humboldt Current that remain uncharted in Passage. While Walls gives an incisive account of Humboldt’s impact upon Transcendentalists and natural philosophers, she is silent on his earliest adopters: educators and textbook writers who understood Humboldt’s holistic visions long before he had become the hero of Cosmos. When Humboldt’s primitive maps bearing “isothermal lines” (the ancestor of modern weather maps) first appeared, they were scarcely noticed in scholarly circles.

Before they percolated up to the salon and the café, they would become well known in the classroom to thousands of American pupils who worked through the geography primers of William Woodbridge and Emma Willard in the 1820s. Woodbridge, Willard, and the textbook writers who copied them, were quick to see the genius in Humboldt’s holistic displays of information, extending, colorizing, and annotating his isothermal maps. By the 1830s, geography primers had abandoned rote lists of names and places to emphasize “the relations among things” including climatic and ecological zones, economic production, and maps displaying the world’s population by their “degree of civilization.” Here is the irony that Passage misses: while elites continued to see Humboldt as a living encyclopedia well into the 1830s, the “rougher classes” had already come to understand his work in more modern, post-Cosmos, ways.

“Isothermal Chart, or View of Climates & Production, Drawn from the Accounts of Humboldt & Others” in William Woodbridge’s Rudiments of Geography (Atlas), 1823.

If Passage doesn’t chart all the ways Humboldt shaped America, it remains a work of broad scope and great beauty. Walls navigates adeptly through the many perils that confront the Humboldtian biographer. She finds drama in the corners of Humboldt’s life that others have missed. She succeeds in being comprehensive without being exhaustive. She has managed, in the words Humboldt’s brother Wilhelm, to “clothe the skeleton with flesh.” The result is a biography that soars. Of the many excellent works on Humboldt that have emerged in the last decade, this one is the best.

This review is part of a roundtable review of Wall’s book at the H-Environment Discussion Network. Thanks to the H-Enivironment for permission to post this excerpt here.

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This month, W.W. Norton comes out with Steve Kemper’s new book,A Labyrinth of Kingdoms: 10,000 Miles Through Islamic Africa. It chronicles the scientific expedition of Heinrich Barth in 1849-1855. Barth explored Africa at a time when the continent’s relationship with the West was in transition. This was still the era of missionary explorers such as David Livingstone (exploring far to the south) yet in just two decades, a new generation of explorers such as Henry Morton Stanley would survey the continent as the opening act of the “Scramble for Africa,” a European land grab which would put Africa under colonial control for almost a century.

Below is an excerpt of the book in which Barth and his fellow scientist Adolf Overweg are traveling with a tribe of Arab raiders, the Welad Sliman, into Kanem, northeast of Lake Chad. Kemper also blogs about his experiences following in Barth’s footsteps here.

“The next day the group rested at a camp on the edge of a river. “We had a good specimen to-day,” wrote Barth, “of the set of robbers and freebooters we had associated with in order to carry out the objects of the mission.” When a small caravan of Tebu people crossed the river near Barth’s group, the Welad Sliman seized their entire cargo of dates.

Barth’s troupe crossed the river the following day. The ferry consisted of six calabashes yoked together, on which the passenger sat, pushed by two swimmers. From this shaky perch Barth managed to take several measurements of the river’s depth and contours. On the other side, the Welad Sliman filched three sheep for supper. They also kindly cleared a spot for Barth’s tent. Then during the night they stole one of his valuable waterskins.

(“A new skin recently greased with goat or sheep fat is abominable,” wrote explorer Francis Rennel Rodd, “as the water becomes strongly impregnated with the reek of goat. But water from a good old skin can be almost tasteless, though such skins are hard to come by. Some of the water one has drunk from goatskins beggars description; it is nearly always grey or black, and smelly beyond belief.”)

The rulers of Bornu did nothing to protect the region’s beleaguered villagers from freebooters, yet squeezed the people for tribute. The villagers also paid off marauding Tuaregs. The Welad Sliman simply took what they wanted. Four days after stealing the dates, they plundered some cattle-herders, taking not only their milk but the containers. The herders appealed to Barth and Overweg, who recovered the vessels, empty, and apologized with some small presents. During the next day’s travel, while Barth bought milk from some cattle-herders, the Arabs stole one of the herders’ horses. Later that day the robbers snatched another cargo of dates, plus the ox carrying them. “And yet the people who were thus treated were subjects of the King of Bornu,” wrote Barth bitterly, “and the Welad Sliman were his professed friends and hirelings.”

Despite the violence and lawlessness, Barth tried to focus on his scientific mission and his faith in knowledge. “There was a feeble spark of hope in me,” he wrote, “that it would not always be so, and I flattered myself that my labors in these new regions might contribute to sow here the first germs of a new life, a new activity.”

Barth’s Route through Africa

There were compensations for his observant eye, starting with the peculiar landscape. To the north, sand hills rolled into the Sahara. To the south, marshy flats and lagoons led to the blue waters of the lake. On the grassy plain in between lived farmers and herders. The Arabs shot a beautifully patterned snake that Barth measured at eighteen feet, seven inches, with a five-inch diameter. The natives cut it open for the fat. After noting lots of elephant tracks and dung near the shoreline, Barth finally saw “one of the most interesting scenes which these regions can possibly afford”—a herd of ninety-six elephants, “arranged in a natural array like an army of rational beings, slowly proceeding to the water.” He sketched them.

Two days later, trying to find their way out of a “labyrinth of lagoons,” Barth’s horse panicked while trying to cross a deep bog and fell on its side, with Barth underneath. As both creatures thrashed to extricate themselves, the horse kicked Barth several times in the head and shoulders, without severe damage. “I had on this occasion a good specimen of the assistance we were likely to receive from our companions in cases of difficulty,” wrote Barth, “for they were looking silently on without offering me any aid.” Like vultures watching an animal stuck in a mudhole.

On October 1 they reached the outskirts of the Welad Sliman’s main camp. About 250 horsemen formed a welcoming line and greeted them with musket fire and wild war cries. At the Arabs’ urging, Barth and Overweg responded with the traditional gesture, galloping straight up to the line of horsemen and saluting them with pistol shots. (“This is a perilous sort of salutation,” wrote the explorer Dixon Denham, who knew first-hand. As he and his Arab companions galloped to greet the sultan of Mandara, they trampled and killed a mounted onlooker and broke his horse’s leg.)

Barth and Overweg were shown a spot to pitch their tents. “We had now joined our fate,” wrote Barth, “with that of this band of robbers.”

For Barth, the trip’s main purpose was to solve another geographical puzzle. The Bahr el Ghazal was a sandy valley lined with vegetation that sometimes contained water. Barth’s question: was it a source for Lake Chad, or an outlet? He asked the Welad Sliman’s young leader to arrange an excursion there, about 200 miles east. No, said the man, impossibly dangerous. Then maybe they could explore the eastern side of Lake Chad? Perhaps, said the man, since they were about to go raiding in that direction. In several ways this was not what Barth had signed up for, though he shouldn’t have been surprised.

The raiders didn’t move for several days. Barth, still weak from fever, welcomed the time to recuperate. He began learning Tebu. He also developed a taste for camel’s milk, which he began to prefer. “Milk, during the whole of my journey, formed my greatest luxury,” he wrote. But the milk in Kukawa disgusted him because the Kanuris added cow’s urine to it, to keep it from going sour.

One night there was some excitement when a prize female slave, captured as booty and destined for the vizier’s harem, ran off. The next morning they found her necklace, bloody clothes, and gnawed bones.

The Arabs broke camp on October 11 and rounded the northern edge of Lake Chad, heading southeast. Their camels carried empty sacks to hold plunder. They traveled in an atmosphere of threat and aggression, constantly on alert for attacks, their own or an enemy’s, since everyone in the region hated them. Scouts raced off to check every rumor about possible victims or assailants. Despite the oppressive heat, the horde camped in shade-less places to foil ambush by foes and wild beasts. It was physically and psychologically exhausting.

Barth and Overweg didn’t know the Welad Sliman’s objective or destination. On the route towards pillage, Barth dutifully recorded vegetation, geography, animal sightings, names of villages, and currency (white Bornu shirts). His information often came from the native peoples they passed, since they knew the region “so much better than that band of lawless robbers who took no real interest in it except as regarded the booty which it afforded them.”

On October 17, after an early start, they reached the edge of their goal—the territory of the Woghda, a Tebu tribe. The Welad Sliman prepared themselves for violence in time-honored ways, with fiery speeches and fierce cries. Galloping warriors waved white banners. To hide their approach, they camped without fires. “But as soon as it became dark,” wrote Barth, “very large fires were seen to the southeast, forming one magnificent line of flame”—beacons summoning the resistance. The Woghda would be ready for them.”

Steve Kemper has been a freelance journalist for more than 30 years. His first book, Code Name Ginger: the Story Behind Segway and Dean Kamen’s Quest to Invent a New World (Harvard Business School Press, 2003), was selected by Barnes & Noble for its Discover Great New Writers award. He has written for Smithsonian, National Geographic, National Geographic Adventure, National Geographic Traveler, Outside, Wall Street Journal, Yankee, National Wildlife, The Ecologist, Plenty, BBC Wildlife, and many other magazines and newspapers. He grew up in Louisville, Kentucky. After graduating from the University of Detroit, he taught literature and writing at the University of Connecticut while earning a Ph.D. He lives in West Hartford, Connecticut.